Brute Force Searching

ByWalter Wimberly

Now in some cases, we’ll use a brute force method of searching. This is slow and inefficient from a run-time perspective. However, it is relatively fast to write.

With a brute force search, you scan through every item in a list until you find the element.

Why use Brute Force

As you can imagine, scanning through every item can be a time consuming process, especially if the list is large, so why would we do it?

Well, first, there is an issue with items not in an array (or Python List). If you are using a data structure like a linked list, then you know you cannot go to the middle element.

Second, as we work with complex data, who’s to say that is how we are sorted. Consider a class of employees. They are sorted by Employee ID, however, you are searching by their name. The ID and Name for the object may have nothing to do with one another. And even if they did, what’s the odds that other values like department, or years of service, match up with the Employee ID.

Finally, we may not write an efficient search algorithm if we rarely search – but that is pretty unlikely.

How to Create a Brute Force Search

The pseudo code for a brute search might look something like:

Function findEmployeeByName(search)
    For employee in employeesList
        If search = employee.lastName then
            Return employee
        End If
    Loop
End Function

Of course, if we are using a simple array, then brute force is not likely a good choice. Rather, we’d want to sort the data, and then do a search if that was possible.

Brute Force Searching was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

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